Oksana Pasaiko
The Whole World - Without Me = The Whole World
2025
€375,00
Four colour silkscreen print on Old mill Bianco 510gr paper
90 x 70 cm
Edition of 20 copies, signed and numbered by the artist
In stock
about this work
This limited edition print on heavy paper shows an image of a wall on which Oksana Pasaiko wrote the words ‘The whole world – without me = the whole world’. It is a dry observation, almost casually phrased, and yet it immediately raises questions. Is it an act of self-effacement, or a way of seeking to be remembered? Its strength lies precisely in this ambiguity. She seems to erase herself, but does so through a clear mark of presence. By writing the words on the wall, she leaves her trace on the world she insists will continue perfectly well without her.
Seen from a distance, the work looks almost documentary: an ordinary city wall. Up close however, the photo reveals itself as a field of printed dots, a raster of tiny spots of colour. It is a classic printing technique, but here it strengthens the idea that this sentence – like its maker – is only temporarily visible. What first seems solid and graspable becomes elusive, as if the material world falters and the image dissolves before our eyes.
Oksana Pasaiko often worked with what escapes the eye, with what is absent yet still palpable. This gesture, too, is small, precise and charged. In the light of her recent death, it is inevitably read as a final message, even if it does not aim to be one. It resists sentimentality and leaves space for interpretation. Exactly as Pasaiko always did.
about Oksana Pasaiko
Oksana Pasaiko was an artist from Ruthenia, a historical region somewhere between today’s Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine and Romania. Where she came from exactly was never certain, and that’s no coincidence. Pasaiko deliberately chose to keep her background unclear. She wanted to separate her work from her biography, as if her own story mattered less than what she made.
A key part of her practice is the long-running publication the whole world – without me = the whole world, a series of postcards she developed with Roma Publications since 2004. Each card shows one of her works. Together they form a concentrated insight into her way of thinking and making. Her works are rarely straightforward, and it is exactly that openness that makes them invite repeated viewing.
One card shows Short Sad Text (based on the borders of 14 countries). This work consists of a piece of soap in which Pasaiko marked existing borders with human hair – borders not shaped by rivers or mountains, but by historical and political conflicts. Another postcard shows her work Correction (Mistero e malinconia di una strada, Giorgio de Chirico, 1914). This is a digital reworking of the famous painting by the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico. In Pasaiko’s version, the mysterious shadow behind the building has been removed.
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